1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to information systems and, more particularly, to a system and method for automating the creation of electronic documents.
2. Background of the Invention
Many individuals and organizations create and maintain documents that contain information. The individual documents can be organized in such a way as to form a coherent set of documents that provide information about the individual or company, or other useful information. One example of such a document is a web page, and one example of the coherent set of documents is a web site. The web sites include large numbers of web pages, which are linked together, so that people can easily access and move back and forth between the web pages. These web sites are created and periodically changed, modified, or updated. It is desirable to provide an Internet-based web publishing system and method that simplifies the creation and editing of web sites.
It can take a high level of technical skill to create and organize a web site and the pages on that web site. In contrast, adding content can be a simple operation. However, if users of little skill access the web site to add content, they may make a mistake that adversely affects the operation of the web site. Thus, it is desirable to allow technically skilled users to create and organize a web site, and give them the ability to allow less skilled users to enter content without the possibility of the less skilled users creating problems with the web site.
Typically, when a new web page is created, links to that web page must be manually added to the pages from which the new web page will be linked. Every time a web page is added, and often when a web page is changed, the page that links to that page must be changed. This can be a time consuming and challenging task. It is easy to lose track of which documents should link to the created or modified document, so it is easy to fail to update the links correctly. Similarly, some web pages have links to other locations on the same page. When the web page is changed the links must also be changed. Again, this task can be time consuming and difficult to do correctly. Users of limited skill would typically be unable to perform this task. Thus, it is also desirable to provide a way to more easily add and update links to documents such as web pages.
Further, in such a web publishing system, the locations of some web pages can change in relation to one another as pages are created, edited, previewed, published, and maintained. For example, a web page may be in one location during editing, then moved to another location for normal use and viewing of that web page. System maintenance may require that web pages be moved from server to server. Certain uniform resource locators (“URL”s) within the web pages do not function correctly if the location of the web pages containing the URL changes. Therefore, it is also desirable to provide a way to automatically modify URLs so that the URLs of web pages work correctly in a web publishing or similar system.